Author: Ben Supnik

Plugin Developers: Please Try This Fix

X-Plane 11.20r2 has only one bug that we are trying to fix: a bug in the plugin SDK that can cause some plugins to crash when creating and destroying windows.

Tyler and I dug into this and found that the fix was a bit more intrusive than we wanted for this late in an RC.

So: if you are a plugin developer and you are working with the new SDK, either for VR compatibility, to use the new 3.x APIs, or just because you are updating the plugins, and you have time this weekend, please email me and I can send you our new fixed XPLM DLLs.

My hope is to get half a dozen plugin developers to bang on them over the weekend, so that when we cut 11.20r3, it really will be the release.

Edit: RC3 is live – thanks to everyone who helped!

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Deleting Your Missing Scenery Packs Is Not a Bug (But Is Kind of Dumb)

We received a last minute bug report that X-Plane 11.20r2 deletes scenery packs from scenery_pack.ini. This is true! It is also by design, not a bug, the same as X-Plane 10, and not particularly brilliant on my part.

scenery_packs.ini persists the order of your packs (putting newly discovered packs “in front” in alphabetical order upon discovery) and maintains enable-disable status. But it does not retain any other information. The file is totally rewritten on every run and the following otherwise useful stuff tends to get destroyed in the process.

  • Comments and notes to yourself
  • Whitespace and formatting
  • Any scenery packs that can’t be found

Unfortunately this means that if you symlink to an external drive that is unmounted and run X-Plane, your scenery pack order gets lost. This definitely does suck.

In a future version, I can fix this. But we’re not going to mess with it now during RC because it’s totally not changed or broken compared to all past versions of X-Plane since we introduced the scenery_packs.ini file.

For now: you can lock the file as a hack-around to preserve your well-created order while your remote drive is unmounted – when you re-mount and restart, your order isn’t lost. But in this order, new packs aren’t persisted to the file, although they will be used.

If there’s things you want the scenery_packs.ini file to do, commenting on this post would be on-topic. One thing to consider: if we can’t drop missing packs, how do we know a pack was uninstalled? How does the file ever get cleaned?

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X-Plane 11.20r2 Available

X-Plane 11.20r2 is up – we’re just killing off the last show-stopping bugs – full notes here. Steam build should be available Real Soon Now™ – it’s already uploaded and just waiting to make we didn’t blow something up.

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X-Plane 11.20b5 Is Out

X-Plane 11.20b5 came out this week – notes here. Beta 5 fixed the rest of our open rendering engine/material bugs, including artifacts on orthophotos. If you are a scenery or aircraft developer, please check your aircraft or scenery against 11.20 beta 5 and make sure there are no rendering changes compared to 11.10. If it looks different than 11.10 in a bad way, we don’t know about it and it’s not going to be fixed if you don’t say something.

Over the last year we’ve been working quite a bit internally to automate testing. We still do a lot of hand-testing (that is, Jennifer flies the sim and then tells us we’re bozos) but we also have extensive infrastructure to script the sim. So we’re looking to automate the process of checking third party scenery for rendering artifacts, so we can catch more rendering bugs more often.

I’ll post once 11.20 is final about how to get your custom scenery into our test. My hope is that with automation, we can catch bugs faster and you (the third party author) can have your add-on tested without having to do the work yourself.

I’m OOTO next week but if things go well, we’ll have a release candidate when I get back.

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More X-Plane, More WED, More Docs

After much bug fixing, X-Plane 11.20 beta 4 is out – here are the fixes. This beta fixes Linux performance, a few material rendering bugs for custom aircraft, and a bunch of X-Plane SDK bugs for VR.

We have a new WED 1.7.0 release candidate – hopefully the third time’s a charm!

And…we have docs on the vrconfig.txt file format. The VR config file is used to add VR-specific data to an aircraft, including:

  • Hot spots for seats (E.g. where does the pilot sit).
  • Extra data for manipulators.
  • Parameters for the yoke in VR.

Please do not ship your add-ons based on 11.20 VR tech – wait for us to go final. All file formats are subject to change during beta!

We are reaching the end of beta, for both WED and X-Plane. We’ll see, based on incoming bugs, whether we need a beta 5 before RC; hopefully WED 1.7.0r3 is a keeper.

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Beta 4 and VR Docs Are Coming

We’ve been working on 11.20 beta 4 for a while now – the goal for beta 4 is to fix all of the SDK/authoring bugs and have docs for the new VR file formats. We’re making good progress; beta 4 should be this week, barring an unforeseen bugtastrophy. (Linux users: perf should be fixed with beta 4.)

We received a number of bug reports that beta 3 was showing large numbers of _vrconfig errors with third party aircraft. So this seems like a good time to re-iterate our policy on file format stability and betas.

  1. Don’t ever ship an add-on that uses an undocumented file format. You can’t guess what the fine print is from example aircraft.
  2. File formats are subject to change during beta, and are not stable until we go final. Don’t ship your add-ons against beta file formats.

In our case, the _vrconfig.txt file format changed in beta 3 and will change again in beta 4; as Chris wrote docs, he found issues that he is fixing.

Our priority during beta is not stability of your add-on, it is getting the file format right, so we’re not stuck with a buggy file format for the rest of time.

Once we go final, we’ll put compatibility code in to support the final version shipped in X-Plane when needed.

Similar logic applies to the SDK – it’s fantastic that people are using the latest SDK to test their plugins in VR, but don’t hit the “ship it” button until we’re final – it is always possible that the SDK will change in a way that breaks compatibility during the beta.

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New Lego Bricks for Airport Designers

X-Plane 11 has had several fantastic updates to the library of lego-brick airport objects that ship with X-Plane. We’ve had new European-style objects, elements for small airports, and the terminal and jetway kits let you build really great looking airports that fit the exact shape of the real-world airport you are modeling.

In that context, I’m pleased to show you a sneak preview of the next set of lego-brick objects for gateway airport authors.

You can download a preview if the new lego bricks here.

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X-Plane 11.20 Beta 3 Is Out

Release notes detail the bug fixes here. We have another set of bug fixes that will go into beta 4 next week.

We’ve received a number of bug reports from plugin developers trying to use the new plugin APIs. We’ll have another beta next week to address the rest of the open issues, including the ability to (finally) use widget-based UI in VR.

Beta 3 fixes the MFD brightness going crazy in the G1000 C172, and fixes shadow casting on transparent-alpha-textured objects, but we still have an open bug with panel brightness in a Carenado aircraft that looks like a low level rendering bug. 11.20 has a lot of change to the rendering engine to support VR, performance and our migration to Vulkan and Metal, so authors: please be on the lookout for changes to how your models render compared to X-Plane 11.11.

If beta 3 isn’t found to be a smoldering wreckage of poorly thought out C++ over the next day, we’ll post a Steam version of the beta.

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X-Plane 11.20 Beta 2 Is Out

It’s like beta 1, but without the missing art asset. 🙂

We’re working on beta 3 now, which will have some fixes for rendering bugs. A few notes:

  • This is not going to be a typical eight-week beta. Please go check your add-ons this week.
  • The biggest area of code change for VR that affected other parts of X-Plane was the rendering engine. I’ve fixed 3 rendering bugs where I broke something while restructuring the renderer for VR, and none were surprising. Please check your aircraft or scenery pack for visual defects and let us know!

Steam users: we should have beta 2 up shortly.

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X-Plane 11.20 VR6: Can We Break the Curse

X-Plane 11.20 VR preview 6 is out, and if preview’s 2 and 4 are any predictor, it’s going to be a dreadful disaster, as all of the even number previews have been so far.

But maybe not! Maybe we can break the curse – after all, Star Trek did it with Nemesis. Anyway, VR6 is available for public beta. Steam users – we’ll post it on Steam tomorrow if we haven’t found a major problem, otherwise we’ll go right to 7.

Highlights:

  • Asynchronous Space Warp (ASW) works for the Oculus Rift.
  • No more white instruments.
  • No more crashes loading some third party aircraft.
  • The xPad won’t follow you around as you teleport around the tarmac.

Depending on how things go, this might be the last VR preview! ASW and xPad teleportation were the last two big VR specific issues; if things go well, we’ll produce a general 11.20 beta for everyone with the other features mixed in. I’ll post about that next week if VR6 doesn’t have to be recalled for insubordination.

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